Friday, April 12, 2013

Kermit the Killer Gosnell routinely killed live, viable, fully delivered babies at his Philadelphia abortion clinic. He now stands accused of 1st degree murder relating to seven of those infants. The story was completely ignored by the mainstream media. A picture of the completely empty media chairs in the courtroom is an indictment of every news agency that seeks to bury an inconvenient story.

Finally in the wake of an excellent article by Kathleen Powers in USA today and a concentrated twitter campaign that has #Gosnell as the most tweeted term of the day, it's starting to get a little attention. There were 225 articles on a Google search this evening, it included articles the National Post, the Washington Post, LA times, CBS News, and Fox, but it was nowhere on the home page of Google News. You still have to look for it. Still the campaign is having some impact, Pro-choice journalist Megan Mc Ardle wrote an honest article, "Why I didn't write about Gosnell and Why I Should Have" and Real Clear Politics listed 3 stories in its afternoon report.

This is a brutal disgusting story, that must be told. It's a tragedy, but I'm optimistic that in the coming days people will learn about the horrors that unrestricted abortion access has on women and children. I'm hopeful that it will start discussions about how we can protect women and children and highlight how unreliable many of our news sources have become.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Thousands of teachers and students across the country donned pink t-shirts to take a stand against bullying today. No one likes a bully. Too bad we're all bullies.

A couple of years ago I volunteered to help with a self esteem workshop for young children. We led a small group of kids through a morning session and there was a 10 year old boy at my table who was very outspoken about how he was bullied at school. Naturally, I was sympathetic to the young guy and he hung out with me through various activities the whole morning. Part way through a new boy from his class joined our group. The first boy said, "You can't sit here fatso." I politely said that the new boy was welcome to join us and we moved on. Soon we had an activity sorting candy, again the first boy says, "this won't work. Fatty is going to eat them all!" Finally I pointed out to the first boy that he was being the bully, but he just couldn't comprehend that he could be a bully too.

I thought of this a few months back when some radio announcers convinced a nurse caring for Kate Middleton that they were part of the Royal Family she shared way to much information and the prank went viral. The nurse committed suicide shortly after the prank presumably because of her shame at the incident. The radio jockies lost their jobs and had to go into hiding because of all the threats that they received after the incident. Nobody looked good in this situation the radio hosts and hundreds like them make a living tormenting and ridiculing vulnerable and trusting people and they are enabled by their audiences. After the news of the nurses death, the pile on of criticism and the threats the djs received were their own form of bullying.

In fact the pink shirted crusaders are likely shaming non conforming students that are uncomfortable wearing pink - they are inadvertinely bullying the students in the name of anti-bullying. It's typical, some of the worst bullies are those who seek conformity in the name of diversity, in fact the National Review Online has an excellent interview about a new book, Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.

Let's stop bullying for good. Maybe the first step is to have the courage to wear blue next pink day.